Biographer David Rensin drops in on Miki Dora’s wave

A board-paddling member of the generation that transformed surfing from the pursuit of a handful of salty loners to a big business with its “own” music, clothing, lingo and TV shows, Malibu’s Miki Dora (1934-2002) was the California surfer of the 1950s and ’60s.

He set the pace with his surfing ability and, equally important, his dark, iconoclastic attitude—both of which still inform surfing today.

In All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora, David Rensin wades through the contradictions of Dora’s life to deliver a book as strange as it is riveting.

His subject is no easy one to nail down. The surfing purist’s purist, Dora constantly decried the commercialization of the sport he loved, while paradoxically becoming a stunt double in the horrible beach movies that flooded out of Hollywood in the Gidget era.

Dora’s surfing “morality” also didn’t seem to travel with him when he left the water; he was happy to commit all manner of fraud in order to pay for his surfing lifestyle—a decision that finally landed him in California prisons during the 1980s.

His legend, however, rests less on such indiscretions than on a deep love of the sport that prompted Dora to largely turn his back on the mainstream surfing world for a wandering life of wave hunting. Living in exile in France and South Africa in his 60s, he was still riding some of the world’s most challenging breaks.

Dora’s nature was a slippery one, so it would probably be asking too much of any writer to capture all facets of his multi-dimensional life in one book. Rensin, however, comes close enough to elevate All for a Few Perfect Waves from being just another surf book to a nice piece of California cultural history.

ALL FOR A FEW PERFECT WAVES: THE AUDACIOUS LIFE AND LEGEND OF REBEL SURFER MIKI DORA BY DAVID RENSIN | HARDCOVER | 475 PGS HARPERENTERTAINMENT | $25.95

Tags: Books, miki dora, surfing